The Internet has grown to become an important outlet of electronic communication. Tools such as e-mail, instant messaging (IM; sometimes also referred to as “chat”) and calendar are popular amongst Internet users and have been provided as different web services. These web services help users stay connected to each other and help them become more productive.
E-mail, IM and calendar web services have generally been considered to be separate and distinct. The aforementioned web services therefore are not designed to efficiently work together in an integrated manner. Moreover, given that an e-mail can include a group of participants (e.g., an authoring participant and one or more recipient participants), a user may wish to communicate with the group of participants in the e-mail while using an e-mail web service. However, communicating between the group of participants across different web services (e.g., IM and calendar) within the e-mail web service is typically not provided in a user-friendly manner